The Uneasy Art of Holding the Middle

It begins with a voice. A shareholder on the quarterly call, asking—politely—why cash burn spiked. A board member requesting “more visibility” into pipeline velocity. A founder, silent for too long, finally asking: are we still aligned?

In volatile markets, these moments are not exceptions. They are the rhythm.

Over three decades as an operational CFO in Silicon Valley, I’ve come to recognize that volatility does not just test the balance sheet. It tests the relationship sheet—the invisible network of expectations, dependencies, and unspoken contracts that bind an organization to its stakeholders. Investors. Employees. Partners. Customers. Regulators. Each brings capital of one form or another, and each expects something in return: certainty, return, purpose, or just a plan. And in a market that moves by headline and reacts in hours, those expectations begin to collide.

Stakeholder management in such an environment is not about pleasing everyone. It is about orchestrating clarity when clarity is scarce. It is about managing not just outcomes, but perception. And above all, it is about trust—earned not through performance alone, but through fluency in complexity.

Volatility reveals what stability conceals. In calm conditions, the illusions of alignment hold. Forecasts are met, board decks are nodded through, town halls end with applause. But when the tide turns—when growth softens, runway shrinks, or regulation tightens—the underlying tensions surface. Investors who once prized velocity now demand discipline. Teams that thrived on autonomy crave direction. Founders who built companies on narrative must now answer to numbers. It is in these moments that the CFO becomes the translator-in-chief.

I remember a company—Series C, fast-growing but exposed. Interest rates had spiked, our raise was delayed, and we needed to pivot to profitability—fast. Our investors were split. One wanted a deep cut to extend runway. Another urged continued investment in growth. The CEO looked to me. So I ran the numbers. I built scenarios. But more importantly, I facilitated the conversation. I mapped stakeholders by influence and priority. I anticipated objections not just to the numbers, but to the assumptions behind them. And I told the truth—not just the forecast, but the uncertainty around it. The result was not agreement. But it was alignment.

Stakeholder trust, especially in unstable times, does not emerge from airtight plans or airtight prose. It comes from structure. It comes from an intentional rhythm of engagement—where the questions are known before the answers are delivered, and where the answers are shaped by an understanding of who needs them, when, and in what language.

In my experience, the most effective finance leaders do not simply communicate forecasts. They curate understanding. They do not perform optimism; they manage signal. And in managing signal, they create space for agency—both their own and that of the people around them.

Take investor communications. In volatile markets, investor relations becomes part performance art, part therapy. Financial results matter—but the interpretation of those results matters more. Founders often underestimate this. They believe in the numbers. But numbers without context are ammunition, not insight. A seventeen percent drop in ARR might provoke panic, unless contextualized by a strategic pricing shift. A jump in churn might look catastrophic, unless it reflects a deliberate customer tiering policy. The CFO, in these moments, must act as a narrative translator—connecting financial events to strategic intent, and interpreting short-term turbulence within a longer-term arc.

When the market is watching, every word carries weight. Silence is not neutrality; it is narrative in absentia. Finance leaders must learn to speak with depth, not just data. Because in times of uncertainty, stakeholders do not need precision. They need preparedness.

Employees present a different kind of calculus. While investors seek return, employees seek meaning. Layoffs, pivots, or funding delays ripple far beyond spreadsheets. They unsettle identity. A well-crafted memo is not enough. In such moments, transparency is not a luxury. It is structural integrity. I’ve seen companies suffer more from poor communication than poor strategy. A restructuring announced without clarity creates shadows. Unanswered questions become viral. But when leaders open the books, explain the decisions, and acknowledge what they do not know, something else happens. Anxiety remains, but it is channeled. Trust, even in disappointment, can grow.

Boards sit in an uneasy in-between. They are neither operators nor investors, but carry the burden of stewardship. In downturns, they often drift into the weeds. It falls to the CFO to elevate the conversation. This means resisting the temptation to rehash financials. Instead, it means bringing decision points, trade-offs, and structured dilemmas. In one board I worked with, a looming pricing pivot threatened our go-to-market channel. By pre-wiring the discussion with scenario analysis and partner feedback, we surfaced the risk early—and shaped the outcome before the drama took over. The board was not just informed. It was engaged.

And then there are customers and partners—the outer ring of the stakeholder sphere. Their anxiety is subtler, but no less real. In B2B environments, customers read between the lines. A sudden change in tone, a missing feature, a delayed roadmap—all become signals. The challenge is to speak candidly without breeding panic. I’ve seen finance teams share product usage metrics with enterprise clients, not to boast, but to build confidence. I’ve seen joint scenario planning with key partners create the shared clarity that standard contracts cannot. In uncertain times, your transparency may not eliminate risk—but it can buy patience.

Stakeholder management, ultimately, is not about control. It is about cadence. Clarity delivered regularly. Questions answered in advance. Mistakes owned without deflection. And above all, the cultivation of emotional precision. Because stakeholders, for all their diversity, seek the same thing in volatile markets: a story they can believe in.

And so, the CFO becomes not just the keeper of capital, but the keeper of coherence. They navigate not only cash and compliance, but confidence. They speak for the business when it is unsure of its footing. They model not certainty, but clarity. And that clarity becomes the most valuable currency in a market built on trust.

Volatility is not the anomaly. It is the condition. What defines a company’s resilience is not whether it can avoid pressure, but how it carries its weight. In my years of practice, I’ve found that the companies who emerge strongest are those whose finance leaders act as architects of narrative—integrating numbers with context, performance with purpose, and tension with trust.

In the end, it is not the market that defines a company’s fate. It is the relationships behind the metrics—the humans whose belief, skepticism, and patience must be earned every quarter. And in those quiet conversations, away from the headlines, the future is always being written.

The Language of Volatility

How a CFO Speaks When the Ground Begins to Shift

It begins, more often than not, with a hesitation.

A delay in pipeline conversion. A shift in the tenor of investor emails—from curious to cautious. A whisper from the head of sales that two key deals may not close. The dashboards still show green, but the body of the business—its people, its instincts—has already sensed the tremor.

Volatility never announces itself with a headline. It creeps in through nuance, posture, the unsaid. And when it does, the CFO becomes something more than a guardian of cash or a steward of compliance. They become the voice that must speak into the fog.

For all the frameworks and models that adorn business school walls, few prepare you for this. There is no GAAP standard for uncertainty. No IFRS guidance for apprehension. And yet, in these moments, how the CFO communicates becomes the difference between panic and resolve, between erosion and cohesion.

The first lesson, learned painfully and repeatedly, is that silence is not safety. It is vacuum. And vacuums, especially in uncertain times, do not remain unfilled. They attract speculation, rumor, and fear. When the macro climate tightens, or when the business begins to stutter, employees look not just for strategy, but for tone. Investors, too, begin to parse every word for subtext. And the CFO, though rarely the loudest voice in the room, becomes the one whose clarity matters most.

But clarity, in volatile moments, is not about overconfidence. It is about composition.

I recall one particular week—markets in freefall, our lead investor circling a down-round term sheet, and a product release delayed for reasons both technical and human. In that moment, the instinct was to craft a sharp, data-packed message that would reassure. But numbers without narrative are brittle. What was needed was context. What was needed was a voice that acknowledged the storm but held the wheel firmly.

The best communication from a CFO in such moments is neither euphoric nor fatalistic. It is composed. It is specific. It is transparent in its recognition of risk, but unwavering in its orientation toward action.

It begins by naming what is known. This is where we are. These are the signals we’re seeing. These are the pressures building. The purpose here is not to provoke fear, but to frame reality. Because reality, once named, becomes a shared problem rather than a private dread.

Then comes the second move: interpreting. Volatility is not just movement; it is confusion. The CFO’s task is to turn pattern into narrative. To show how the signals connect. To explain not just what the numbers are, but what they mean. Why is churn rising? Why are sales cycles elongating? Why is burn higher than planned? These are not just performance questions. They are trust questions.

And then, always, the pivot to action. But action, when described by a seasoned CFO, is not a bullet-pointed list of initiatives. It is an architecture of intent. It says: we have considered the scenarios. We have modeled the worst-case. We have identified what we control, and where we must adapt. The words do not need to be grand. In fact, they should not be. They should be precise. Earnest. Human.

There is a quiet poetry in a well-delivered finance update during turbulent times. One that balances urgency with patience. One that offers decisions without defensiveness. The goal is not to remove the volatility—no communicator can. The goal is to reduce the sense that we are drifting.

And yet, perhaps most difficult of all, is the art of what not to say. There is a temptation, in the face of panic, to over-reassure. To forecast what we cannot know. But the CFO, more than anyone, must protect against false certainty. The line between calm and denial is razor-thin, and audiences—especially those seasoned in markets—know when it has been crossed.

So, instead, the CFO’s communication becomes a kind of disciplined empathy. It recognizes fear without feeding it. It shares data without drowning in it. It expresses intent without overpromising outcome.

In times of volatility, communication is no longer just an output of finance. It is a function of leadership.

I’ve seen companies emerge stronger from volatility not because they had the most cash, or the most brilliant plan, but because their teams stayed intact—aligned not just by incentives, but by trust. And that trust was often built in the quiet cadence of CFO updates, all-hands remarks, investor calls, and behind-the-scenes calls with anxious board members.

There is, ultimately, no perfect script for speaking in a storm. But there is a posture. A kind of elegant restraint. One that does not flinch from truth, but also refuses to let truth become terminal. One that holds space for doubt but insists on forward motion.

The CFO is not the company’s orator. But in volatile times, they must become its voice of coherence. And coherence—when the world feels incoherent—is the most stabilizing force of all.